languagehat.com

I finally watched a movie I’d been wanting to see for years, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (悲情城市 Bēiqíng chéngshì).

As a fan of both Jean-Luc Godard and typography, how could I resist Paule Palacios-Dalens’ 2019 article Jean-Luc Godard, the Typographer with a Movie Camera (originally Jean-Luc Godard,le typographe à la caméra)?

I was describing someone (OK, a chipmunk I’d been feeding) as “cosseted” when it occurred to me to wonder where that word came from.

A paper by Michael S.

I’m almost finished with Richard Tarrant’s Texts, Editors, and Readers (1, 2, 3), and I was brought up short by this passage in the concluding chapter: “some particularly important manuscripts – including the Codex Venetus A of Homer – can be studied in g…

Joel has another great excerpt from Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (see this post); after a passage on religion, it continues: Elsewhere, too, the adoption of Indian ideas was selective rather than whol…

This is pretty silly, but it amused me, and it will perhaps amuse the Persons of Welshness among us.

Songdog and I are making some changes that we hope will improve reliability so the site doesn’t keep being unreachable.

Another deep dive into an obscure region of typography, With hollow feet and harlequin hats: Tuscan letters, a prank of lapidary origin?

Just a quick post — we had people over, and it’s late — but I wanted to mention a phrase I was unfamiliar with that turned up in an episode from season 2 of Endeavour (which my wife and I are rewatching after many years).

A correspondent asks about the relationship and comparative etymology of smooch, schmooze, and German schmusen, and I thought it was an interesting enough tangle to post.

Joel at Far Outliers is posting excerpts from his current reading, Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring, and I found Naming ‘Maritime Southeast Asia’ extremely enlightening: This region is often referred to as

Frequent commenter Y sent me a link to Glottle saying “Probably something after your heart,” and boy was he right.

I just learned an interesting bit of word history via Merriam-Webster’s delightfully discursive entry for caprice: Etymology borrowed from French, going back to Middle French, borrowed from Italian capriccio “whim, fancy,” earlier and medieval Tuscan capo…

I recently saw the Sergei Loznitsa movie Two Prosecutors and was impressed enough that I decided to read the novella by Georgy Demidov that it was based on.

I’ve complained about bad reviews more than once, so it’s only fair that I give credit to a good one — namely, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s NYRB review (March 21, 2024; archived) of The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton.

I just watched Orson Welles’ 1952 short ghost movie Return to Glennascaul (silly but gorgeous) and was struck by the phrase “keep in” used of a fire: the narrator meets a couple of women at a crossroads, drives them to their isolated house, and is invited…